Before the Storm (26 page)

They warded off the menace with more statistics: Spiraling welfare costs were a myth; in fact costs were declining. The very dynamism of the American economy left whole sectors behind when markets shifted, and automation wiped out thousands of unskilled jobs a month. How could you blame a helpless individual for that? The city manager Mitchell had replaced, now secretary
to the New York state senate, called the whole scandal “a microscopic example of the deterioration of the German middle class under Hitler.” On July 28 a sixty-year-old reliefer in Oneida County assigned to shovel debris on a 90- degree day died of heat prostration; the same day, in Newburgh, Mitchell hired a local gym teacher as commissioner of welfare. Social work professionals said that was like replacing atomic engineers with tenth graders to build missiles.

It was no use; Mitchell's critics were impotent. Americans in the millions who were not Birchers, who had not read
Conscience
of a
Conservative,
who had not heard of
National Review;
whose families did not own factories, who did not live in military-industrial-libertarian enclaves like Orange County—all read the Thirteen Points, liked what they saw, then tuned out the voices of the experts who pointed to their unimpeachable evidence, moralists who demanded that they care more, and highbrows who compared them to Nazis. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before.

Mitchell was now a right-wing hero. Two hundred YAFers took a festive boat ride up the Hudson from Manhattan to march down Newburgh's Main Street to present him with a two-foot-long plaque, which Mitchell accepted, banana republic-style, speaking from a second-floor balcony: “What more could a Communist want? Here is the realization of a dream of conquest: How to wreck cities, then counties, then states, and then the national government; how to ruin the moral fiber and social and economic structures without the expenditure of anything but an idea.” (Later, when the affair concluded, Marvin Liebman arranged to take possession of the cartons full of citizens' letters, adding seven thousand new names to his mailing lists.)

Goldwater adored Mitchell. He wrote him an exuberant telegram: “Reading the account of your stand on welfarism in this week's Life magazine was as refreshing as breathing the clean air of my native Arizona.... The abuses in the welfare field are mounting and the only way to curtail them are the steps which you have already taken.” When Mitchell traveled to Washington, he met privately for twenty minutes with Goldwater, who was immediately mobbed by reporters: surely his meeting with Mitchell was a warning to Nelson Rockefeller, the Republican front-runner for President, to beware of a Goldwater challenge.

The reasoning was sound: Rocky was the officer ultimately responsible for the disposition of the Newburgh case. “There's nothing political in this,” Goldwater responded. His protestations were genuine. But few believed him. Goldwater was now the hottest politician in Washington. Everyone assumed that his lust for higher office would erupt at any moment; that was how Washington worked. Rockefeller knew how it worked; he knew the law was on the side of
the liberals, but he commissioned a poll: one-third of New Yorkers believed half of welfare recipients were chiselers, so Rockefeller responded to his political dilemma by retreating to his Venezuelan
finca
until things blew over.

 

Barry Goldwater's fame had been steadily increasing ever since the Republican Convention the previous summer. He made 177 speeches across twenty-six states for the GOP ticket, a good portion in Dixie. Nixon staffers seeded the crowds with buttons reading “GOLDWATER SAYS DON'T DODGE: VOTE NIXON AND LODGE.” Many already wore ones reading “GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT.”

By the month before the election, with the presidential candidate professing timid echoes of the Democrat line, a
Times
reporter remarked to Goldwater that he was hearing the word “Nixon” less and less often in the Arizonan's speeches. Goldwater denied it—then undercut himself by saying that if Nixon lost the race, he might run for the nomination in 1964. On October 15, two nights after Premier Khrushchev was seen on TV banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations in rage at the American imperialists, Goldwater treated Nixon to a bruising private workout session at the Westward Ho Hotel in Phoenix in an effort to get him to put more partisan blood into his campaign. They stepped out together into the Thunderbird Room to greet an assembly of Republican campaign workers, a fifteen-foot cactus scrim as backdrop. Nixon was intimidated. “I traveled the country in '58. It was not a pleasant job, I can assure you,” he said self-pityingly in his speech. “Frankly, if the time ever comes when I'm not proud of my party and proud of the candidates I'm running with, then, of course, the thing for me to do is get out of the party. So I can only say, since I don't intend that, I'm going to continue to support every Republican candidate in this state, and also in the nation.”

In the last televised debate, Nixon performed atrociously. It wasn't even his fault: Kennedy, in a legendary dirty trick, cheated by asking why the Eisenhower Administration hadn't attempted to take back Cuba militarily—exploiting the fact that he had been given a top secret briefing that that very thing was being planned. It forced Nixon to sound like a dove so he wouldn't blow the invasion's cover. But Goldwater didn't know that any more than any other viewer. He promptly wrote Nixon: “What this nation wants is firmness in its president.... They want to hear a tough attitude toward Russia—an attitude that might run the risk of war but which would guarantee us a fight for our freedom instead of the slow dribbling away such as the Democrats have been doing at Versailles, Pots-dam, Yalta, Tehran, and Korea.” He warned Len Hall, “Conservatives of both parties are now speaking of staying home. They are being prodded in this by Dan Smoot and Bob Welch, each of whom has a large following.”

In the desperate final days before the 1960 election, Nixon, Rockefeller, Lodge, and Eisenhower met in New York to regroup and plot strategy. Goldwater was not invited—an absence so conspicuous that Senator Kennedy joked, while campaigning in Phoenix, that those Republican potentates would have invited Barry to the New York meeting, “if they can just get Barry out of that Confederate uniform that he has been using in the South.” The laughter was nervous. Opinion polls were showing that Kennedy might become the first Democrat in over a hundred years to lose Dixie. If he did, Barry Goldwater would be a prophet.

It had been an autumn of reckoning for the parties. When the Senate passed a mild civil rights bill in 1957, Republicans unanimously hewed to the tradition of the Party of Lincoln and voted for it. Sixty-two percent of Democrats supported it. When the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act of 1960 in April, once again the Republican senators were unanimously in favor—or at least the ones who voted; thirty-one GOP senators stuck their finger in shifting winds and avoided the session entirely. Thanks to Rockefeller, Nixon hit the campaign trail with a platform supporting voting rights, desegregation, and a commission on equal job opportunity. But in Los Angeles the Democrats—whose 1956 platform complimented the South for resisting
Brown
—did the GOP one better: their unprecedentedly liberal platform (the platform hearings had been chaired by
National Review
whipping boy Chester Bowles) demanded timetables for federal integration efforts. It almost dared Dixiecrats to do anything about it—a passel of them immediately obliging by coming out for Nixon.

Richard Nixon's first campaign tour was through the South. What greeted him there was a revelation: the biggest party in Atlanta, wrote liberal
Atlanta
Constitution editor Ralph McGill, “since the premiere of Gone With the Wind.” A crowd of 150,000 spectators blanketed the route; on the platform with Nixon at Hurt Park before acres of delirious fans, the most enthusiastic demonstration Nixon had seen in fourteen years in politics, the Democratic mayor William Hartsfield warmly welcomed the coming of the two-party system to the South. In the capital of South Carolina, Columbia, Nixon drew 35,000 rooters. Kennedy drew 10,000.

The turnout for Nixon in the South presented a dilemma. Conventional campaign wisdom held that all America was divided in three: some states tended to go or always went Republican (Midwestern strongholds like Indiana and Ohio, New England ones like Vermont and Maine); others never did (the Southern states). The swing states that decided elections were the “Big Six,” the industrial states Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Michigan, and California.
And the swing voters in these states—it was believed—were blacks. Nixon's original strategy was to concentrate on the Big Six, which meant saying things that would scare off the Southern Democrats who suddenly seemed so tantalizingly within his grasp. After Kennedy's nomination, the Reverend Billy Graham, an old Nixon friend, shaken at the thought of a Catholic president, dangled before the Republicans hints concerning his two-million-name, overwhelmingly Southern Democrat mailing list. Race was not on Graham's mind; his other advice to Nixon was to draw closer to Martin Luther King. But Richard Nixon, not so high-minded, understood how you won elections in the South.

The Democrats whistle-stopped Lyndon Johnson through the South in a train reporters tagged “the Cornpone Special.” In town after town the Texan, in exaggerated drawl, would speak of the rewards loyalty to the Democratic Party had brought and would bring. In a tiny hamlet in Virginia he delivered the most memorable line of the campaign: “What has Dick Nixon ever done for Culpeper?” (What, indeed, compared to Virginia senators Harry Flood Byrd and A. Willis Robertson, and their congressman Howard Worth Smith, each of whom had served since 1933?) Goldwater toured the South, too; he called Johnson a “counterfeit Confederate.” In the North, Nixon sat on the fence concerning civil rights. But when Henry Cabot Lodge impulsively promised (others heard him predicting) in Harlem that a Nixon-Lodge Administration would include a Negro cabinet member, Nixon raged at him.

Then, an astonishing development: Martin Luther King was arrested and sentenced to four months at hard labor for taking part in his first sit-in, in Atlanta. Kennedy's civil rights point men Harris Wofford and Sargent Shriver fervently lobbied his campaign managers to have the candidate issue a call for King's release. The managers—Bobby Kennedy foremost among them—were horrified at the thought of scaring off Southern whites. Shriver rushed to the candidate's Chicago hotel room, waited until backs were turned, and buttonholed Kennedy with the suggestion that he phone King's wife, Coretta, with a few words of comfort. Offhandedly, oblivious to his high command's urgent efforts to head off just such a prospect, Kennedy agreed.

That Sunday, Nelson Rockefeller spoke against the King arrest from pulpits at four black churches in Brooklyn. At his side was Jackie Robinson, a longtime friend of Nixon who had nearly broken down in tears trying to convince him to throw in for King. Robinson's argument wasn't only moral; he had been warning Nixon over the course of the entire campaign that his neglect of blacks might lose him the election. Goldwater had been warning Nixon during the entire campaign that his neglect of the South might lose him the election.
It is unlikely that this purebred political animal misunderstood the portent of the decision he would have to make: Speak for King and lose the Southern vote; ignore him and lose the black vote. Nixon's final campaign stop broadcast which bloc he had chosen to court: he spoke at the South Carolina statehouse.

Meanwhile Mrs. King told the
New York Times
about John F. Kennedy's call. Since King, coincidentally, was released at almost exactly the same time, Shriver and Wofford spotted an opportunity. Behind the Kennedy brothers' backs they hastily cobbled together a pamphlet,
“No Comment” Nixon versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy.
Two million copies—nicknamed the “Blue Bomb” after its flimsy paper stock—were distributed the Sunday before Election Day at black churches around the country. They were clutched with reverence by people startled that Kennedy would take this risk in support of their freedom. Georgia Republicans responded with a pleading last-minute flyer: with a President Nixon, “there will be no compromises between the national administration and southern segregationists to pay off for votes.... PLAY SAFE! VOTE FOR NIXON AND LODGE!” When the ballots were counted, Kennedy overwhelmingly won the black vote. So has every Democratic presidential candidate since.

Kennedy also won the election—by an average of one-tenth of a vote per precinct. Republicans affixed blame to a hundred factors: Nixon would have won if Eisenhower had stumped more; if Eisenhower had pump-primed the economy; if not for Henry Cabot Lodge's afternoon naps; if not for the Chicago Democratic machine; if Henry Luce hadn't at the last minute timorously pulled a Life article by Billy Graham preaching that it was wrong to vote for a candidate simply because he was “more handsome or charming.” (Ironically, this last one was among Nixon's favorite explanations.) Liberals said that Nixon lost because he didn't speak against segregationism; conservatives said he lost because he didn't speak for states' rights. They also pointed out that in Illinois sixty thousand voters who marked their ballots for House and Senate, the majority for Republicans, didn't indicate a preference for President. The fact shored up a conservative nostrum: millions of people would rather stay home than endorse the Republicans' leftward drift.

This last message was heard most loudly from the party's conservative star. “It's just what I've been saying,” Goldwater told
Time.
“We cannot win as a dime-store copy of the opposition's platform.” He began acting like he was positioning himself for something. For the first time he hired a press secretary, a former newsman and chamber of commerce staffer named Tony Smith. He turned to Brent Bozell, the hardest of
National Review's
hard-liners, to write
him a head-turning speech on declining American prestige for an appearance at the Air War College November 14, the first foreign affairs address for a politician who “[had] no foreign policy to speak of,” Bill Buckley had complained only a year and a half earlier. The next month, speaking to the Congress of American Industry in New York, Goldwater lambasted the Eisenhower Administration's parting stroke of authorizing $500 million in foreign aid for Latin America. The following morning the
New York Herald Tribune's
cartoonist had Barry ministering to an elephant stretched on a psychoanalyst's couch: “You've been in the hands of quacks.”